Dirty words.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Soundbite

When President Clinton appointed her to a committee tasked with devising questions for a proposed national test of fourth-graders, Diane Ravitch was shocked to discover how stringent bias and sensitivity requirements had become. A reading sample on the nutritional value of peanuts, for example, was deemed insensitive to students with peanut allergies. Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and the author of 2001's Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, investigated the extent and origins of this pedagogical hypersensitivity. She found a disturbing catalog of bipartisan censorship, which she presents in her new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf). Assistant Editor Julian Sanchez spoke to Ravitch in August.

Q: An incredible number of innocuous words and subjects have become taboo in teaching and testing. Why?

A: It's a combination of phenomena. On tests, the rationale is that anything that might upset a student is distracting. If you mention Halloween, someone will be upset. If you have a story where someone has a swimming pool, a child whose family can't afford one is going to get upset. This belief that everything is role modeling, everything affects self-esteem, has been embraced with equal fervor by left and right.

Every political pressure group of every stripe gets to have its say in the textbook selection process. And because there's no real marketplace in textbook sales--they sell to states buying in bulk--the...